Family Historian: Genealogy software: The Tour

The Tour

Scroll down to view tour. Click on any picture to enlarge it. Click again to return to the tour.

Getting Started with the Focus Window

The Focus Window (the main application window) showing spouses and children for Ian Munro, with ‘docked’ property box on the right side

Focus Window showing parents and siblings for Ian Munro

Focus Window showing ancestors of Ian Munro

Focus Window showing descendants of Charles Munro

Pictures and Multimedia

Multimedia Window showing thumbnails

Multimedia Window showing one picture at a time. You can link each person to their face in each picture they’re in.

Property Box showing multimedia thumbnails for Ian Munro (in close-up). You can view the Property Box for any person at any time.

Interactive Diagrams & Smart Trees

Family Historian diagrams are interactive. They are used in numerous ways – for browsing and exploring, for data entry (by click-and-drag), for editing, and for creating charts to print out or send to others.

Diagrams include Family Historian’s All Relatives diagram and the Everyone diagram.

Diagram branches have (optional) buttons which you can click on to expand or close the branch. When you do this, the diagram will automatically adjust to accommodate the change. The circle with a cross on it (right) represents a closed branch.

You can click-and-drag on boxes to add relatives if you wish.

Using automatic source citations you can ensure that correct source citations are added, even when you add relatives in this way.

All trees in Family Historian diagrams are Smart Trees. You can move or resize boxes and branches and the trees adjust automatically.

You have very extensive control over the appearance, content and layout of all charts.

Data Entry with the Property Box

The Property Box (viewed briefly in previous sections) is the main data entry window. It is shown here with the Source Pane displayed (yellow panel on right).

The Property Box is very configurable. Like other windows, you can adjust the text size to suit your needs, and resize or reposition this window as you wish. You can even ‘dock’ it to the side of the main window; and you can customize it.

This window allows you to choose which data items appear on the Main tab of the Property Box. You can even add your own custom tabs if you wish.

Reports

Family Historian comes with 29 standard reports, and you can create your own custom reports. All reports are highly configurable.

Reports can be saved in PDF format, as word-processor documents (in Rich Text Format – RTF), as web pages (HTML format) or as text files.

Reports include three different kinds of narrative reports, such as this Descendants by Generation report.

Create Websites & Family Tree CDs

To create a website to display your Family tree, simply click on Create a Website on the Internet menu and a wizard will take you through a few simple steps, and then generate your website for you. Creating a great-looking family tree CD (or DVD) is just as easy.

An example website page. You can accept the default settings, or override them to configure the site as you wish.

Explore Your Records

The Records Window allows you to search and explore your records. You can sort on any column, and configure columns to display whatever information you like.

Use Queries to Get the Most From Your Data

A query is a stored set of instructions for retrieving data, and for displaying it in a spreadsheet-like grid. For example, you might create a query to retrieve information abut all the male ancestors of your spouse who died of a heart attack or whose cause of death is not known. Family Historian comes with 39 queries when installed, but you can easily create your own.

Other Tools

Family Historian includes a number of other powerful tools, such as…

An Internet Search tool
A How Related tool to show how people are related, directly or indirectly (right)
A Merge/ Compare tool to manage merging data files into your projects
A tool to help you manage links to external files
A tool to help you manage and work with record identifiers.
A Backup-and-Restore facility
A tool to help you split a family tree file into parts.
A facility to help you create and work with Named Lists of records (named lists are used for research purposes as To Do lists, as bookmark lists, as lists of key people, and so on
An import/export facility